Article / Himal Southasian Magazine
Productively ‘Perverse’
The Punjabi subculture is loud, colourful and intense – everything that isn’t ‘decent’ or ‘proper’. And Showgirls proudly adopts this noisy aesthetic to represent the dancers’ lifestyles. This aesthetic comes from the cinema of 1970s-80s Lollywood, the film industry based in Lahore, representing an era that was part of the country’s Golden Age of cinema. It is a specific film style widely known for its vibrant energy, but what most do not know is how it was a powerful form of resistance during Pakistan’s most oppressive dictatorship, that of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s, from 1978 to 1988. The films adopted Punjabi culture’s ‘perverse’ stereotypes and unapologetically played with these to express the working classes’ social and political struggles of the time. In doing so, the films transformed the loudness from just perverse to productively perverse.